Index : E

We may define the ecumenical movement with the Vatican Council as "the initiatives and activities planned and undertaken, according to the various needs of the Church and as opportunities offer, to promote Christian unity." The essence of ecumenism, then, is the promotion of Christian unity. And no one with a spark of faith or after a moments reflection would desire anything but an end to this scandal of Christian division. What is less obvious is the exact meaning of disunity, and the corresponding effort to change a divided Christianity.

Introduction to the Eucharist, the Eucharist in Scripture, the Eucharist and Vatican II, Eucharistic Miracles, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration, and evidence proving that the Early Christians believed in the Real Presence.

The Early Christians actually took the Real Presence for granted. It doesn't even seem as if there was much debate.
I could not find anyone who denied the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament beforethe year 500 A.D.

"We do not usually associate Easter and the Holy Eucharist. But we should. Our faith tells us that God became man in order that, by His death on the Cross, He might redeem the world. But this same faith tells us that, when Christ died on Calvary, the Church came into existence. We may therefore say that we were delivered from sin by the Savior's death, and receive the blessings of His grace through the Mystical Body which came into being the moment Jesus expired on Good Friday." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S. J.

The eighth commandment of the Decalogue in the Old Testament is worded almost identically in Exodus and Deuteronomy, in both of which books we have the text of the Decalogue. It says: "You shall not be a false witness against your neighbor."

"God in His mercy allows evil that greater good may come as a result of the evil. He has allowed contraception to plague the modern world so that we may repent and return to our Father's house. I have deliberately stated the title of this conference in uncompromising language: "Either we stop contraception or we destroy the family." This is a warning to all of us, married and single, the laity and the clergy, bishops, priests, deacons, and religious, parents and children." - Fr. John A. Hardon

Lord Jesus Christ, You told us to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God. Enlighten the minds of our people [in] America. May we choose a President of the United States, and other government officials, according to Your Divine Will. Give our citizens the courage to choose leaders of our nation who respect the sanctity of unborn human life, the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of marital relations, the sanctity of the family, and the sanctity of the aging. Grant us the wisdom to give You, what belongs to You, our God. If we do this, as a nation, we are confident You will give us an abundance of Your blessings through our elected leaders. Amen.

On May 13, 1982, Pope John Paul II offered the Sacrifice of the Mass in Fatima, during his pilgrimage of gratitude to Portugal. During the Mass, the Pope preached a lengthy homily on "Marys Maternal Love." This homily I consider the most authoritative explanation of the meaning of Fatima that we have received from now seven Roman Pontiffs since the first revelations made at Fatima in 1917.

The term "ethical culture" is commonly applied to a movement started by Felix Adler (1851-1933) in New York City in 1876. It has since come to be applied also to the societies which owe their origin to the principles of ethical culture, even when affiliated with other religious bodies or institutions.

Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, Men and Women in the Consecrated Life and all the Lay Faithful on the Eucharist in its Relationship to the Church. Given in Rome, at Saint Peter's, April 17, 2003.

These recommended books, videos, audio tapes and periodicals will help you to increase your knowledge and
devotion to the Eucharist. The list of books are valued for their use in churches and chapels that have Exposition of the
Blessed Sacrament. The audio tapes and videos may be used to prepare people for the coming of Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament to their parish.

To understand how indispensable the Eucharist is to the practice of Christian chastity is to understand the meaning of Christianity. When Christ told us, "Without me, you can do nothing," He meant this to be taken literally. Without the constant help of His grace to enlighten our darkened minds and strengthen our weak wills, all the moral precepts of the New Testament are so much pious rhetoric or religious jargon.

With this as a short introduction we are ready to reword our title to read, "The wellbeing, even the survival, of the human family depend on the faith of married people in the Holy Eucharist in imitating the mutual love of Jesus and Mary."

The priesthood in the Catholic Church is identified with many things. The priest can be pastor, teacher, counselor, writer, administrator, or social worker; but the main reason he has been ordained is because of the Eucharist.

"The Eucharist as the Real Presence is the touchstone of sanctity. As evidence of this fact we have the witness of the saints who, when they speak or write about the power of the Blessed Sacrament to sanctify, seem to be positively extreme in their claims about what the Real Presence can achieve in making a sinful person holy." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"As Catholics, we believe that there is absolutely no differencenone whateverbetween Jesus in
the Eucharist and Jesus, as we profess in the Creed, at the right hand of His heavenly Father." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

The Eucharist, therefore, is the best way to foster vocations. This means that persons who attend Mass, receive Communion and invoke Christ in the Blessed Sacrament obtain light and strength that no one else has a claim to.

Let us focus on two features of this mystery: first reflecting upon the Eucharist as Reality and secondly as Presence. What is this Reality to which the Church strongly directs our attention? This Reality is God present in a different special way. The essence of what we believe here is that God is present as man. The Eucharist began with the Incarnation, in the womb of Mary. Except for her there would be no Jesus and without Him there is no reality to speak of, in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is unqualifyingly Jesus Christ!

"Without the Eucharist, there would not be a livable sacrament of matrimony or a stable Christian family .The Holy eucharist is
indispensable for living out the supernatural, and therefore humanly impossible, demands that Christ places on those who enter marriage in His name." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Jesus understood fully the challenges to the faith of His followers. There are seasons of grace in our lives, times of consolation
and times of desolation. There are times when it seems easy to place our faith in Christ, and other times when it is very difficult.

The Holy Eucharist is the profound sacrament of the Church, the profound expression of God's love for His people. In this
sacrament, we have the ultimate expression of the mutual expression of love between God and man. God, by giving us Himself in
the Eucharist, gives Himself to us in a way which is total, and which places Himself completely at our disposal.

"We will reflect on the meaning of the Holy Eucharist as a channel of grace and how Holy Communion is a means of obtaining supernatural
sustenance for the divine life we received at Baptism." In addition, Fr. Hardon explains how to become an Apostolate of Holy Communion.

" The Mass and Holy Communion derive all their meaning from the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament We shall draw on the irreversible teaching of the Council of Trent about the Real Presence." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S. J.

The moment we say that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life, we are faced with an avalanche of ideas that contradict this statement. It was this concern about the Eucharistic errors in our day that occasioned Pope Paul VI to issue his historic encyclical Mysterium Fidei, the Mystery of Faith, during the Second Vatican Council. The pope foresaw two major errors which threatened the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

The worship and custody of the Holy Eucharist, independently of Mass and Holy Communion, can be traced to post-apostolic times. St. Justin, writing in his Apology around the year 150, says that deacons were appointed to carry the Blessed Sacrament to those who were absent from the liturgy. The young St. Tarsisius was taken captive and put to death while carrying the consecrated Species on his person.

The Eucharistic crusade is a special part of the Apostleship of Prayer. It concentrates on the spiritual and doctrinal formation of children and adolescence. Through the Eucharistic crusade young people are prepared to live an above ordinary Christian life and become trained in the apostolic spirit of bringing others to know and love Jesus Christ.

"If there is one mystery of our Faith that is being widely challenged today it is the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Pope John Paul II is deeply concerned about this weakening of belief in the cardinal truth of Catholic Christianity." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"We are asking why Eucharistic education is important. A better question would be why Eucharistic re-education is necessary, not only to refute the widespread erroneous ideas, but to restore the true Eucharistic faith among, I dare say, millions of professed Catholics." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

this study was, for the author, a real revelation, so clearly did it bring home to him the fact that the Blessed Eucharist, with which the priestly character is in some way identified, is, of its nature, a center of sacerdotal life. To this center the noblest thoughts of the priest's mind and the best affections of his heart should be made to converge in such a way that his whole life be, as it were, irradiated by the splendor of the consecrated Host.

So Christ ordered that the Catholic priest not only should represent Him upon earth, but that he should be, as it were, Himself again, raising him above the rest of mankind, nay, above all angelic spirits who admire, with holy envy, those among the sons of men whom they see clothed with sacerdotal dignity. Thus the seraphic St. Francis was wont to say that, were he to meet at one time an angel and a priest, he would first salute the priest. Now, this dignity of the Catholic priesthood takes its root in the Most Holy Eucharist. In fact, it was in view of this divine Sacrament that Jesus Christ instituted the order of priests, whose function it is to consecrate and distribute the Lord's body to the faithful.

Now, the Catholic priest is, on the one hand, on account of his hierarchical dignity, on a par with angels and so he is placed, as it were, in a middle position between God and man. On the other hand, he carries or transfers the things of God to the people, that is, His commandments and His graces, and he carries and transfers to God the things of man, his prayers and sacrifices with which man seeks to appease God and to conciliate for himself the divine favors.

It is the property of the Blessed Eucharist to produce in him who receives it worthily, marvelous effects which transform the soul and in some way deify it. In this manner the Apostle St. Peter, speaking of the great and precious promise made to us by God, among which foremost is the Blessed Eucharist, says that God made them, in order that, "by these we may be made partakers of the divine nature."(Pet. 1.4.)

The Blessed Eucharist is the culminating point of the wondrous works of God. It is also the food which nourishes the Christian life and the spring which refreshes our souls. Above all, it is the raison d'être of the Catholic priesthood, which owes its origin to it and is centered around this August Sacrament. In fact, the priestly vocation unfolds itself, blossoms and ripens under the secret yet most powerful influence of the Blessed Eucharist. The sacerdotal ministry all turns round this mystery of love. In it, as in a most pure and inexhaustible source, the minister of New Law finds all those spiritual helps, all those heavenly consolations of which he stands in need in the exalted state he holds in the Church and in the world.

In the eyes of the faithful the Catholic priest represents the sacred Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose sanctifying work he continues upon earth. For this reason, every good Christian surrounds the priest with that respect and veneration which the crowds had for the Person of the Saviour when He lived upon earth. For the followers of the devil, the Catholic priest is still the representative of God in the world. Hence he is hated, despised and persecuted by them as was the divine Master at the hands of the Pharisees.

We have already observed how the habitual thought of the Blessed Eucharist is, for every Christian soul, but especially for the sacred ministers, a powerful means of sanctification. Indeed, it cannot be proved a difficult task for a priest who has made a serious study of this August Sacrament and is convinced of its excellence and sublimity, to accustom himself to make his thoughts converge toward the Blessed Eucharist, and, as it were, to constantly live in its atmosphere. As St. Thomas justly observes, those actions to which we feel more inclined, in which we take greater delight and to which we particularly attend, are usually styled our lives. Thus, music is the musician's life, painting that of a painter, and theology that of a theologian.

The Catholic faith cannot just be believed to be retained. It must be understood. There is no option. We so frequently, and correctly, insist on developing the virtues of patience, charity, chastity, humility and obedience. But the one virtue upon which all the other virtues depend is faith. And it is so important to remember this: we believe with the intellect. Either our minds are thoroughly convinced and our conviction keeps growing with increased intelligibility or the inevitable happens  not only will the other virtues weaken or be lost, but faith itself will disappear. That is why the strength of the Catholic Church in any period of her history depends on the depth professed Catholics understand the faith.

But whatever else we have learned by now, it ought to be the constancy and stability of Catholic doctrine on the Real Presence. We should also begin to see how any tampering with the Churchs Eucharistic doctrine is tampering with the foundations of Catholic Christianity. The Churchs strength lies in her consistency of teaching on the Real Presence. Yet as we saw, and will continue to see, this constancy of doctrine in teaching what Christ had revealed at the Last Supper and the never waning faith in the Real Presence is a single principle reason for the stability and unity of the Catholic Church.

The main source of information is found in the Council of Trent, which met for 18 years from 1545 to 1563. During these sessions, the Council issued three extensive documents on the Holy Eucharist in this order: on the Real Presence (October 11, 1551), on the Holy Communion (July 16, 1562), and on the Sacrifice of the Mass (September 17, 1562).

By the late eighteenth century, throughout the nineteenth century and especially in our own twentieth century, forces hostile to Catholic Christianity became more organized, more effective, and more devastating than ever before. I believe these forces can be reduced to two: modernism and secularism.

There is generally no difficulty speaking about Holy Eucharist as Communion Sacrament. In fact, this is the most common way most Catholics think of Holy Eucharist. However, our perspective will be more specific. We will reflect on the meaning of Holy Eucharist as a channel of grace and on how Holy Communion is a means of obtaining supernatural sustenance for the divine life we received at baptism.

Now we enter directly into the heart of this Eucharistic Retreat. Our aim here is to better understand what we mean when we say the Holy Eucharist is not only the Sacrifice Sacrament of the Mass or the Communion Sacrament, but the Presence Sacrament. When we speak of "Presence Sacrament," we are saying the Real Presence of Christ on earth in the Eucharist is the source of grace four times over.

Our present focus on why Christ instituted the Real Presence also can be summed up in one word: "profession." Christ gave us the Real Presence in order that we might profess to Him in the Blessed Sacrament our faith, hope and love.

We continue our reflections on why Christ instituted the Real Presence. In this meditation, we will consider the fact that Christ gave us the Real Presence so we might profess our hope in Him as our final destiny.

This is the hub of our prayerful reflection. What does it mean when we say we profess our love for God in the Real Presence? We mean any one or all of the following three "Pís": prayer, practice and promotion.

After having seen something of the rule of the Real Presence and the pattern for our imitation of Jesus Christ, we are now in the position to look at three of Christís virtues which we are invited to imitate in our Eucharistic Lord: the humility of Christ, the poverty of Christ and the chastity of Christ.

We must brace ourselves against this prevalent ideology if we are to truly imitate Christís poverty in the Real Presence. And let us also bring to mind what St. Francis De Sales warned the followers of Christ: "To desire to be poor but not to be inconvenienced by poverty is to desire the honor of poverty and the convenience of riches."

Throughout these meditations we have been learning how we are to practice our faith in Christís Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament. However, up to this point, our reflections have been mainly concerned with our own spiritual lives. Now we turn our attention to the apostolic dimension of our faith in the Holy Eucharist: How can we become apostles of the Real Presence in the modern world?

This meditation will help deepen our understanding of how the one Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist has three dimensions by being a sacrament three times over: a Sacrament as Sacrifice, a Sacrament as Communion and a Sacrament as Christís Presence.

By training, we mean both instruction of the mind and inspiration of the will. In Catholic vocabulary, training means enlightening the mind in order to motivate the will. God came into this world not as some "Divine Philosopher" but as the Divine Teacher, a teacher who wants the human race to obey the divine will of God. Thus, the purpose of Catholic training, teaching and educating is to instruct the human mind in order to motivate the human will, so that the will conforms to the will of God.

As we come to the end of our Eucharistic Retreat, we still have one more important area to prayerfully consider: the motivation for promoting Eucharistic Adoration. Here we ask ourselves, "How do we convince people that Eucharistic Adoration is desirable?" I use the word "desirable" advisedly because I believe Eucharistic Adoration is necessary.

No retreat on the Holy Eucharist would be complete without at least one meditation on the Blessed Virgin Mary. We know adoration is due to God alone because He alone is worthy of veneration as the source and destiny of our being. We have also seen that since God became man in the Person of Jesus Christ, our adoration of Jesus is really the adoration of God in human form. Since Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is here on earth in the fullness of His Divinity united with the humanity He received from Mary, we are to adore Him in the Holy Eucharist. This is the highest form of worship we can render to God and the most powerful source of grace we have on earth in our journey to a heavenly eternity. On all these counts, the Blessed Virgin is our model of what our adoration of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament should be.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus goes back to the early Church in the time of divine revelation. Just like all other true devotions in the Catholic Church, devotion to the Sacred Heart is based on true doctrine and divinely revealed truth. Two passages in Sacred Scripture are the revealed foundations for Sacred Heart devotion. The first is Christís invitation to His followers, "Learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart." The second revealed foundation is Christís Sacred Heart being pierced on the Cross by the soldierís lance. From the very beginning, the followers of Christ were devoted to the Heart of Jesus. This meditation will focus on what we mean when we say the Sacred Heart is the Eucharist. Then, we will discuss why this is so and how we can put Sacred Heart devotion into practice.

"I thought we would start with a saint from the fourth century. Why? Because it was in the fourth century that the Church first assembled what we now call a catechism of the principal doctrines of the Catholic faith. Then we will jump to the thirteenth century, when the first major heresies against the Real Presence began to plague the Church. Our next choices will be from what is popularly called the post-Reformation Age when Protestantism deprived whole nations of their fidelity to the See of Peter. Finally we shall look at a few modern saints whose Eucharistic holiness is an inspiration for our day." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"One of the surprises of the church's teachings since the Second Vatican Council is its strong emphasis on devotion to the Real Presence. Worship of the Holy Eucharist, not only during Mass or when receiving Holy Communion but as reserved on the altar, has been part of Catholic life and practice since the earliest centuries." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Science has freed man from subjection to many of the forces of nature and, in large measure, brought them under his control. One effect has been to give man a sense of mastery of the universe, which he never enjoyed before. This includes mastery over human life, from planning conception to determining who shall live and for how long. Another effect has been to immerse man in the satisfaction of this world, which his own genius has discovered, with corresponding indifference to whatever lies beyond the experience of mans life on earth."

The present century is the most violent and murderous in the history of the human race. There have been more death casualties in wars fought since 1900 than in all the previous centuries since the dawn of the human race. There are now more legalized murders of unborn children in one year than in all the ages of the world up to the beginning of the twentieth century. What makes this world of ours so murderous is not only the number of willful homicides of innocent people. It is the fact that one once civilized nation after another has legalized these crimes, and defends this demonic attack on human beings and what is by now a library of books and an ocean of media that have perverted the minds of millions in countries like the United States.

We get some idea of the gigantic task awaiting the missionary work in Russia from the opening sentence of the policy statement of the Soviet Union in the heyday of Communism. The government told the people that, "The Soviet school, as an instrument for the Communist education of the rising generation, can, as a matter of principle, take up no other attitude towards religion than one of irreconcilable opposition. Communist education has as its philosophical basis Marxism, and Marxism is irreconcilably hostile to religion." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

No other aspect of the Churchs teaching has grown more rapidly and more profoundly than her grasp of the meaning of evangelization. In order to begin to appreciate what this means, it will be useful to see how the concept of evangelization has developed from the pontificate of Pope Paul VI to that of John Paul II. Then we shall look briefly at the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to see what it says about evangelization. Finally and mainly we will examine how Pope John Paul II applies the latest understanding of evangelization to awaken the sleeping giant of the Catholic Church. The Pope foresees the twenty-first century as the dawn of the greatest renaissance in Christian history, on one condition. Believing Catholics must be aroused from their stupor and inspired to proclaim Jesus Christ and His Kingdom as has not been done since the dawn of Christianity.

For the sake of convenience we shall limit our study to a single document, the most important issued by the Evanston conference, which was drafted by the Committee on Faith and Order, voted on by the delegates and "commended to the Churches for appropriate action." Condensed into four thousand words, it is the only strictly theological statement emanating from the 1954 World Council, and deals specifically with the core problem of the ecumenical movement under the title, "Our Oneness in Christ and Our Disunity as Churches." In order to do it full justice; we shall first summarize, with quotations and without comment, the main ideas of the Evanston declaration, and then give a critical evaluation of its doctrine on church unity from the Catholic standpoint.

The Evanston Assembly of the World Council of Churches might have been expected to take a stand regarding the Catholic Church. From the earliest years, the shadow of Rome hovered over the first beginnings of the Council. In 1919 when the founders of the future Council were canvassing for member churches, they called on the Holy Father and invited his co-operation, which he courteously declined.

"A balanced understanding of Christ and His Church includes the realization of conflict with the evil spirit or as Saint John calls him, "The spirit of darkness." Until not so long ago it was not popular to even talk about the devil, and all of a sudden he has become quite popular. Though I am afraid that much of the popularity is not very deep, though it does indicate an instinctive realization in mans heart that besides the world of sense, space, and time, that there is a world of spirit. And not only a spirit world which is good, but given the shear magnitude of the evil in the world there must be besides human malice, invisible malice that is at work in the human race today." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"For most people, the examination of conscience is part of their preparation for their reception of the Sacrament of Penance. However, our focus here is rather on what we technically call the examen of conscience. This is a daily prayerful reflection on our service of God. There are two basic examens of conscience. One is called the general examen and the other the particular examen." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"If there is one part of the spiritual life that St. Ignatius stressed, it was the daily  and even twice daily  examination of conscience. It is very important, therefore, that we form a clear and correct conscience. This means that we cultivate a sensitive judgment which is alert to the least offense against the Divine will and, at the same time, protect ourselves against the wiles of the evil spirit." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"My first International Eucharistic Congress was in Wroclaw, Poland in
1995. A devout Polish priest, ordained in Krakow in the 1970s by Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, led a pilgrimage to Poland and the Czech Republic with the highlight being the 46th International Eucharistic Congress. The pilgrimage began out of a parish in Ft. Myers, Florida. As my renewed desire for the richness of my faith grew, I was enticed to go." - Sandy Klaud